I’m running into Poe’s Law here. I genuinely have no idea whether or not this is a parody. If it were just the videos I’d assume it was, but after looking over the website a little I find it hard to believe that anyone could work this hard on a parody. Here’s the video:

It’s just amazing, isn’t it? I saw this Monday on a post by Christina at WWJTD, who probably wrote more coherently about it than I will. Frankly I’m tempted to just point and laugh.

If you don’t feel like spending six and a half minutes of your precious life watching this shit, and I can’t say I blame you, it directly compares Planned Parenthood to drug dealers. Seriously. Saying that PP gets kids addicted to sex so that they can sell abortions. I am not making this up, it’s right there in the video. You see why I’m not sure whether they’re joking or not?

These jokers call themselves the American Life League. That’s a bit of a mouthful, so I’ll call them AL. They’re mostly opposed to abortion, but also birth control, sex education, population control, stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, euthanasia(they’re talking about Kevorkian), and organ donation. Frankly I’m shocked that they didn’t just go full-Luddite and hate on medical science entirely. I still don’t understand why taking a drug to prevent pregnancy is a wicked thwarting of God’s will, while taking a drug to help fight a disease that your immune system can’t handle on its own is just fine.

Assuming of course that it’s not all an elaborate poker-faced joke, I guess it’s starting to sink in that Planned Parenthood does a whole lot of stuff that’s not abortion. Since this is obviously true with even the most cursory glance at anything related to PP, there’s no point denying it. I’m not quite sure how AL’s reasoning goes from there. Perhaps it’s that since PP does abortions, anything else they do must be bad, or maybe telling elaborate lies is okay because of the big bad abortions. Or maybe the idea that PP is evil because all they do is abortion is so set in the minds of AL that when confronted with undeniable evidence that PP does other things, AL has to find a way to trace it back to abortion.

AL seems to be saying that Planned Parenthood’s entire existence revolves around using government money to perform abortions. AL couldn’t quite decide whether PP did this out of greed, or a deep abiding lust for the murder of innocent zygotes, so it comes off sounding like neither the money nor the abortion is the point, but that the point is to spend your money, taxpayer, on someone else’s abortion. That’s a pretty specific kink for a non-profit.

It seems weird to me to claim that PP is obsessed with sex. I mean, Planned Parenthood, as the name implies, is about planning to be a parent. As you may be aware, sex is a non-trivial part of that process, so it should be expected, therefore, that PP will spend some considerable time and resources on the subject. AL, meanwhile, has this stated goal:

American Life League exists to serve God by helping to build a society that respects and protects individual innocent human beings from creation to natural death—without compromise, without exception, without apology.

I really don’t understand what implying that kids should feel embarrassed for masturbating has to do with this. Of course, they don’t actually say that, but it’s in the subtext.

Oh, did I mention the subtext? It’s everywhere. Some of it is more sub than others. I don’t mean things like “sex ed is bad because it has pictures of genitals and naked people, so it’s porn, which is also bad!”, that’s just text. The subtext says interesting things like, “Safe sex is bad”, “Masturbation is bad”, “Seeing someone naked is bad, even if it’s just a cute cartoon character”, “Sex is something to be ashamed of, embarrassed about, not talked about.” In general they seem to be saying that “Sex is bad”, it reminds me of that old joke about sex being a filthy, dirty thing that you saved for your one true love.

In fact, the only way I could possibly believe that they’re arguing in good faith is if they absolutely hate sex. See it as something nasty, a necessary evil that should only ever happen between married people out of duty or a desire for children. This is not a healthy outlook.

To act as though teenagers are only interested in sex because they took a sex ed class is so divorced from reality that I have to struggle to imagine anyone actually believing it. I mean, except for a handful who are genuinely asexual, it’s perfectly normal for adolescents to have a strong interest in sex. This isn’t exactly rare, esoteric knowledge!

AL’s hatred for sex ed includes something I noticed in arguments from Prop 8 supporters, too: Anger that schools would teach kids something true. On their website AL says that sexual education consists of “programs which aim to impart graphic, detailed, sexual information to our children.” Well yes, and history education consists of “programs which aim to impart graphic, detailed, historical information to our children.” What exactly do you think “education” means? More importantly, why do you want your children to remain ignorant?

Ok yes, yes, sex addicts beholden to Planned Parenthood’s sinister, drug-dealeresque persona, trapped in a cycle of buying birth control and abortions while attending PP’s orgies which are cleverly disguised as support groups. But I don’t buy that, and the only reason I can imagine to keep them unaware is to force them to be a certain way, to keep their perception narrow so that they think they have less choice in who and how to be than they really do. Which seems like a terrible thing to do to a person.

If that’s the case, it comes back to exactly the same reasoning I see in the Prop8 crap, “If we don’t tell them about gay people, our gay kids will stay in the closet and pretend to be straight.” And make no mistake, that’s what happens, it’s not that keeping them hidden means fewer gay people, it just means that the gay people live in fear and misery, hiding who they are and lying to their loved ones, hating themselves and the world they live in, or else resorting to suicide. Just as learning that masturbation is normal doesn’t turn kids into sex addicts, learning that homosexuality is normal doesn’t turn them gay. Learning how to use a condom can only be, at worst, irrelevant to them. It’s not going to turn anyone into a depraved sex-fiend. Knowledge is always preferable to ignorance.

In the end, I cannot believe that this is presented genuinely and in good faith. It’s either poker-faced parody with an awful lot of work put into it, or it’s disingenuous propaganda. And frankly I have no patience left for poker-faced satire, I don’t find it funny anymore and it just makes things much harder to see clearly and talk about meaningfully. Now assuming that anything like this must be satire and laughing at it, or telling them that their joke was played too straight to be funny? That I can get behind.

That took a lot longer than expected. Still trying to catch up, hope to get another post up today. In the meantime, have a great day, and may all your sex be safe and wonderful.